People come to therapy for different reasons. Some want a safe place to express their thoughts. Some want feedback. Some want advice. Some want to process all the crappy things that happened in their childhood, in their marriage, at their place of work.

Most just want someone, anyone to listen. And these things that deserve an ear, they’re very important. They’re important because if we don’t take the time to stop and self-reflect and to receive feedback, then what adjustments do we know to make going forward in life?

If we’re not looking at our own negative core beliefs and how they impact our view of ourselves, of others, of the world around us—then we could go through life with a misconstrued idea of what life is or was all about.

There are some who never step foot inside a therapist’s office. They do their own self-reflection. Or they do very little self-reflection at all. To each his own. There’s room for variety and difference in the world.

I’ve always been more of the philosophy of “the unexamined life is not worth living.” If a person can do all that examining without the assistance of a therapist, fine.

The more I do this work though, the more I feel that we as therapists need the room and space to go through life and make our own mistakes without the imperative that we live up to some idealistic standard.

Another saying, “If you put someone on a pedestal, you give them no choice but to fall.”

In the article I wrote for the Elephant Journal I tried to lay this out from the beginning, a few months before I received my license. I will not be put on a pedestal of perfection. It’s not healthy. In other words, from the beginning I’m saying I have made mistakes in life and I will continue to make mistakes both personally and professionally.

And it’s not like I’m looking to make mistakes or that is my focus or desire or intent even. I’m simply stating fact.

And when I make a mistake, I apologize for it.

I’ve had a few friendship shake-ups in my life. I call them friendship shake-ups, a phrase I thought maybe I invented but come to find out is ubiquitous, because to me it’s what it feels like. A shake-up like an earthquake. The ground itself on which the friendship stands seems to shift and the friendship loses its balance.

It’s that moment when you have a friend or circle of friends and something in the dynamic of the friendship changes. Someone, for instance, does something that another finds offensive or disrespectful.

Or someone makes a change in their political choices due to a change in ideals and values, and it affects their relationship with the friend who still thinks the way they used to think about things.

Maybe a friend who formally was never religious becomes hyper religious and finds it hard to maintain a friendship with their atheist friend. Or maybe a person changes their sexual orientation, and it causes ripples in a friendship network as the other friends find it hard to adapt to this friend they have known for years who is going through a change in gender identity, for example.

I don’t know, any number of things could happen to disrupt a connection between another friend or network of friends. Another saying, “People enter our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

But I bring all this up to point out that these things happen in life. They’ve happened to me. And what I’ve learned from these experiences is that while we want to hold on to our friendships, to these people, it’s also totally okay if they decide for whatever reason to exit our lives.

People change. Energies shift. Some lose interest in friendship altogether. Some walk away feeling hurt. Some simply walk away. I feel fairly neutral about it all and maintain the attitude that loss in life is a constant. It’s a part of life.

I’ve made the personal decision that if for any reason anyone in my life decides that they can no longer be a friend, can no longer be present, can no longer be supportive in any capacity then I’m completely okay with that person leaving.

If I start to feel that way towards someone, that I cannot be supportive or present, then I give myself the same permission to leave. I would encourage my clients to come to a place of being okay with loss as well. And in saying that I put absolutely no value judgment on the choice to leave.

I think we all are doing the best we can in life. I think we all are essentially good and try to do what’s right. I feel that for myself and I witness that in others. But we’re also fallible. Despite our fallibility, I watch people time and again do their best with what they have.

And if we operate from that premise—that everyone is just trying to do their best—then how can we walk away feeling hurt, really, by something someone says or does or if they offend us even? A lot of what we perceive in life as personal attacks in fact are not personal at all.

I feel good about the place that I’m at in life, remarkably well, better I can say than at any other time I have felt in my life and despite the challenges I myself currently face. Those challenges at the moment are largely financial. Ask any beginning private practitioner and they would likely be hard-pressed to say they don’t have financial challenges.

And do financial challenges cause stress? Absolutely. And does stress impact all areas of life? Yes, it does. Can stress itself throw us off our moorings? Absolutely.

Yet somehow at the end of the day, I am able to balance it all. I reach out to those who are present and supportive and when my clients go through stressful situations, I encourage them to do the same.

It’s a sign of health to be able to reach out—not to everyone. To those for whom we make the choice to reach out. So, I know am doing something right and by my measure of what is right for me.

In 1961 Tillie Olsen, who was a writer, teacher, and activist, won an award called the O. Henry award for a short story named “Tell Me a Riddle.” It was the title story in a collection of short stories that she wrote. In my junior year of high school we read one of the other stories in the collection called “I Stand Here Ironing.” In that story the protagonist, who is a mother, reflects on the way she parented her first child. As she is recalling her firstborn Emily’s growing up years, she is talking in her mind to who appears to be Emily’s school guidance counselor.

She is standing at an ironing board in her home as she irons and in her mind is the conversation. She is thinking of the things that she wants to say and address with the guidance counselor once they speak in person or on the phone. We can all relate to those almost meditative moments when we’re doing a mundane task and placing ourselves in a future moment, a conversation.

The guidance counselor has got her thinking because he called her out of concern for her daughter. You hear in this mother’s words as she self-reflects her feelings of guilt. She struggled in raising her children. She reflects on how each child grew up in a different way.

Each child’s critical period marked a different moment in the family’s history—the time Emily’s father deserted the family, the time Emily’s mother worked hard as a single parent. The protagonist reflects on how she got better at parenting over time and with the other children and how that concerns her as well when she thinks of Emily. Perhaps Emily didn't have that same advantage.

The short story ends with “Let her be. . . .There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.”

And so, as a reader, one begins to think. Is this how the mother felt about her life—with the iron as metaphor? Did she feel helpless in a way by situation and circumstance and does she want better for her daughter?

Or is this a reflection on the time period overall and women’s rights, or both? The reader begins to think so. The story takes place in the 1950s and the protagonist reflects back to the 1930s and 1940s.

But why this short story is so compelling and the reason for my even mentioning it here is that it is a commentary, as well, on a parent’s circle of influence. The protagonist mother talks about her 19-year-old daughter Emily, the one the guidance counselor called in concern over and about how much of how her daughter appears today is an amalgamation of so many things.

There was all the parenting that her mother gave, but also all the things that Emily came across in her environment, the people, places, and things there were beyond her mother.

“There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me,” she says.

I observe sometimes in parents concern about their children and outside influences. There is the ex-wife who is concerned about how her former husband lets their child stay up until 3 a.m. on a Saturday night when the child is at his house.

Or maybe there is the grandparent who overdisciplines the grandchild and is overly strict. One or the other of the parents may worry over that. There is the caregiver that worries over the experience the child had with bullying in school.

Or maybe there was that summer that the child wasn’t able to go on the high school trip when their band played in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade because they had the flu—and what impact did that have? There was the tragic death that happened in the family when the child was at a young age. These are all fictional examples or examples that I draw from friends and family.

But whatever that thing is that is outside and beyond the parent and exerting an influence—situational factors, people, places, things—those things are there for a reason and for the benefit of the child. And though I see parents in pain sometimes over not being able to exert control, those things actually can work to their child’s advantage.

Even the things that aren’t so pleasant, because what happens is that the child learns how to adapt in different environments. It builds their capacity, for instance, for resilience.

I want to say to these mothers, like the mother so beautifully portrayed in the short story, like my own mother—it’s going to be okay, it’s all going to be okay. Those things your child went through, the traumas of life, they have the capacity for making your child oh so much stronger.

We are mysterious beings—and it’s a wonder how some have the capacity to develop resilience in the face of adversity and how some struggle. Why, for instance, for some does a bad experience contribute to an excuse for continued undesirable behavior, while in others the same experience becomes a reason not to continue in undesirable behavior?

If we as clinicians could just get a lock on how to do that better—how to better build resilience. We have different tools and techniques to try in order to build that capacity, but at the end of the day every person is unique, every situation, every family.

One child grows up with an alcoholic parent and never touches alcohol as a result. Another child grows up with an alcoholic parent and themselves become an alcoholic. I spoke earlier about epigenetic effects and perhaps with this example both children have the marker for alcoholism, but something in the environment triggers the expression of it for one and not the other.

And maybe it is as simple as that.

But that puts a lot of influence and control in the environments we find ourselves in, and I think it takes away from acknowledging a person’s ability not only to be influenced by the environment, but to exert influence over one’s environment.

The goal is to reach a place maybe of being able to respond to what appears before us throughout the course of any given day and not always just to constantly react, react because of past hurts and traumas and automatic negative thoughts and negative core beliefs and the like.

And I really do believe that therapy can help with that. That is the whole purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish here—to alleviate personal suffering, to heal, to prevent people from harming others. This profession that I’m in, it really is a noble one with an ambitious aim. And it’s one of the reasons why I love it so much.

It’s not perfection we’re aiming for, but it is an attempt at improving things—a sometimes faltering and feeble attempt and a sometimes steady and stable attempt. The struggle to overcome adversity—some liken it to learning how to walk.

They say the toddler, when she falls down, doesn’t say to herself this walking isn’t for me. She gets back up and tries it again until she masters it.